To begin, some background. I’m in my late 20’s, I live in a moderately sized Canadian city of around 350,000 people, I am university educated and I’m not horribly disfigured or afflicted with Tourette’s. In a crowd, I would not stand out and the police have never kicked my door in. I’m a typical dude aged 18-40. I’m the guy NBC courts with every show they produce. I drink beers and eat beef. I hate Renee Zellwegger.

Over the course of the last decade or so of my life I’ve had 16 jobs. I think it’s 16, the memory fails in these autumn years and more than one of my jobs didn’t manage to last 4 days so if I was enjoying a Thunderbird bender that week it’s possible I could have blacked it from my memory completely.

Some of my jobs took place while I was in school, others during summers, others after I graduated and foolishly expected something to change. They never tell you when you’re paying for your education that it’s not going to change unless you actually got a useful degree. I suppose it’s irony that I should have been smart enough to know my educational direction was stupid. For those who hadn’t heard, I chose to major in philosophy. No, really. Actually, philosophy and English with a post-grad in public relations. In practical terms, that means I may be full of more shit, of an intense texture, color and flavor, than you could possibly believe. It’s like an art form for me. If you give me an hour, I could convince you that Must See TV from the 90’s was a reflection of Post Modern Marxism with a feminist twist. You wouldn’t believe it but I would have spoken for so long in such vague detail you wouldn’t remember if I made a point and you’d be so glad I stopped you’d just nod, which is really at the heart of any good philosophy.

At any rate, nearly every job I have ever had has been ridiculous to a greater or lesser degree. Is it this way for everyone? I don’t know. So where did it all begin? What job started my journey of stupidity that, to this day, hasn’t stopped? What happened there? Let’s see…

Job #1 – Cook @ Best Value Family Restaurant

I don’t know the order of a lot of my jobs’ I’m not sure of the exact year for many. But you always remember your first, right? Unless you suffered some head trauma or something, which tends to happen to me sometimes too. But sadly, I never got hit on the head at the Best Value Family Restaurant.

I took this job during my first year in college. For one semester, I was taking culinary management. I planned on being a chef. This was before the English/philosophy master plan came together.

So, being that I was training to cook for a living, I figured I’d go out and get a job that let me express my culinary mastery. At the Best Value Family restaurant, a shit-hole diner attached to a department store that had been replaced by a no-name brand department store that decided to keep the restaurant. Imagine a Target, if Bob’s Shit Emporium bought one out and sold all the same crap, but only versions of it that came from South America or stores down south that had been ransacked of stock after they were set on fire. And that Target had a diner, full of sassy, middle-aged waitresses and me in the kitchen.

Best Value’s menu was an eclectic selection of shit which was frozen that I reheated. We had an all you can eat fish and chips special that was very popular. I took frozen fish and frozen fries and put them in hot oil, then put them on a plate shaped like a fish with a sprig of parsley and a lemon wedge. Sexy. We had 2 kinds of fish and 2 fish plates and I would get the fish plates confused all the time because they were plates shaped like fuckin’ fish and who gives a shit what kind of fish goes on what fish plate? The answer was this surly whore of a waitress. She’d bitch every time if I used the wrong plate, apparently positive the customer, most likely a geriatric mall walker from a nearby apartment complex, was going to snap like a breadstick and rage against the Best Value corporation in the form of many angry letters that he got the skinny fish plate instead of the fat one for his all you can eat fish bonanza.

One of my favorite memories of Best Value was the egg salad. It sat there in its plastic container up at the garde manger, or whatever you call that shithole spot in a diner where the various cold products are housed, next to lettuce and tomatoes and ranch dressing and lemon wedges, and never once, in the month and a half or so that I worked there, did I ever make any new egg salad. As a cook, I found this odd. I never made an egg salad sandwich for anyone, and I never threw the egg salad away at the end of the night. The level never seemed to go down. Sure, there were a couple of other cooks who worked there who could have been making all manner of egg salad in the days I was off, but were they?

Suffering intense boredom and disgust at the surly whore waitress (I call her a surly whore not because I am familiar with her sexual habits or simply out of rage, it was just a matter of fact that she was quite noticeably surly and had a tendency to apply blush and eye shadow in such a way as to suggest her make up came in an aerosol can or some kind of pressure washer), I decided to set up an egg salad sting. Using far too much time and effort, I set up a line of parsley flakes along the uneven ridge atop the egg salad. Like a culinary trip wire, I would be notified if anyone were to disturb that egg when I was away. Did the egg salad stay stationary forever as I suspected? We would soon find out.

The remainder of the day consisted of me cooking liver and onions and fish and chips. I may have also had to mix up some secret sauce, which was equal parts mayo and BBQ sauce. The BBQ sauce was housed in immense, oil barrel sized drums with a cartoon ape on the logo. To this day, I wonder what an ape has to do with BBQ. The answer is probably delicious.

My next shift revealed what I had feared. An unbroken line of parsley. This egg salad was at least 24 hours old and completely untouched. How long could this go on? There was no time to consider it now, for more liver had to be fried and probably a club sandwich or two needed to be made. The surly whore waitress has the balls to bitch about my toothpick placement. It’s not perfectly centered. The customer may contract herpes or vampirism, I guess. Fuck.

A day passes. The egg salad has moved! My parsley line is broken, but not gone. This indicates to me, based on levels, someone made a sandwich. The egg salad is two days old and has been used but not replaced. I smooth out the top and repair my parsley line. What does the future hold, beyond salmonella?

There’s another problem with the fish plates. I put the lemon on the wrong end. No, really. The lemon goes near the fish’s eye, I put it on the tail. Not only does surly whore waitress correct the mistake, she brings the plate back to show me. Inexplicably, I only nod instead of smacking her saucy mouth. I am the picture of demure calm and reason at work. I bend like a reed in the wind when faced with idiocy. I am a zen master of douche.

I have a day off, which is likely spent using my body as an amusement park or getting drunk. Well, likely both. Back to work for a lunch shift.

The egg salad has moved again! But the line is still half there. Good lord, someone made another sandwich, and yet not replaced the egg salad. It’s bordering on a week old at this point, I think. Is this even legal? My mind reels. I know, inside, that I should just throw it out. This is wrong and dangerous and none of these ancient, decrepit old customers deserve this. I’m being a jerk by not changing it. And yet, I recall I have been told more than once not to throw away any food unless management says so. Management is a lady who sits in the back all day at a computer. I don’t know what she’s doing, but she never comes out. Ever.

Two more days pass and then, as something of a blessing or perhaps by the very will of God himself who could no longer stand it, the egg salad seems to have been changed. Suddenly the only motivation I had to return to work has been sucked away. What the hell am I doing here now? Putting toothpicks in the wrong damn place and lemoning tails.

I was hired in mid to late November. Now, midway through December, we start some half assed Christmas promotion. Turkey with stuffing and mashed potatoes. They’re all prepared already, I just heat them. They go on a round plate, so even surly whore waitress has trouble picking out things to bitch about. And suddenly, Christmas passes and I am called down to the basement. Some woman I have never met before awaits me in an office by the punch clock and the lockers that I never knew existed. Shit, I never knew we had a basement. All this time I have been tossing my coat in a corner of the staff room.

The woman is someone from the office staff, I guess. She tells me that I’ve been there a little over a month and they don’t really like me, so they have to let me go. I play the sentence over in my head. They don’t really like me. I begin to laugh.

The unknown lady scowls at me as I bust up in my seat, confronted with the most hilarious firing I have ever heard of. She says “I take it this wasn’t a surprise then?” in some snotty tone that suggests, somehow, she’s the one who’s been put out here. I laugh harder and she asks me to leave. I didn’t know you were allowed to get angry at someone for their reaction to being fired. I also didn’t know you could just fire someone because you don’t like them.

I return to the staff room to get my belongings. The manager is at the door and says nothing to me. I laugh some more and she frowns. As I leave the restaurant, surly whore waitress is bitching at another cook about a fish plate. My time at this job lasted just short of a month and a half. It was the first real job I ever had. It was retarded.